


Dollhouse - One Drug Makes your larger and one makes you smaller, just ask Alice...

by shadowkat67



Series: Dollhouse Episode Reviews [5]
Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Review, Episode: s01e07 Echoes, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-29
Updated: 2009-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:00:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22406101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: Review of the Dollhouse Episode Echoes
Series: Dollhouse Episode Reviews [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612507





	Dollhouse - One Drug Makes your larger and one makes you smaller, just ask Alice...

As noted in my previous post, **Dollhouse** as of yet has not engaged my emotions. I watched it twice, partly because the first round was with a friend, and you miss things when you watch tv shows with other people - you can't rewind, and are distracted. You also tend to have your opinion of the episode shadowed a bit by their reactions to it. The friend commented that while Dollhouse engaged him intellectually, it still failed to engage his emotions. He wanted to love it, but just couldn't - he felt oddly detached. I realized that this described my own feelings towards the series, quite well. There are shows that engage only my emotions and not my intellect - such as Grey's Anatomy (which does not hold up under any analysis whatsoever, in fact if you do analyze it - you realize how illogical the story is), or Desperate Housewives, Brothers & Sisters, and Ugly Betty - these are tv shows that do not engage my mind. Neither does about 85% of the procedurals on tv for that matter. But I prefer my brain dead tv shows to not include dismembered and tortured bodies in just about every frame, it's a thing. Also, serial killers are so passe. (please imagine a grinning emoticon at the end of that sentence).

That said, Dollhouse does engage my brain, and plays games with it, feels a bit like a puzzle-box. So I find myself intrigued and feeling anticipation based on that intrigue. Sometimes the shows that engage my brain and not my emotions fill me with more anticipation than the opposite. I disagree with people who think that only those cultural items that engage our emotions are worthwhile - this is not true. Sometimes, the ones that engage our brain are the ones that motivate us to do and try different things. It's a bit like the discussions I've had regarding mathmatics. For years, I was, admittedly, negative regarding the study and practice of mathematics. But, within the past few years, I've discovered that math and numbers are not less because they lack the ability to engage emotion. Or resonate emotion. Also, you can actually swear in math, you can get angry with math, you can sing in math, math does have a voice. We hear the sound of numbers in the chords strummed on a guitare or the notes plucked out on a piano. Music is math. Music with lyrics is math put to words. And when math is turned into music it does engage our emotions, just not always our intellect. I write this while listening to my downstairs neighbor pluck out chords below on a guitar - composing a song.

But back to Dollhouse. This week's episode was titled **Echoes** and it is within this episode that we are introduced to Caroline and the Rossum Corporation - the entities behind our lead character, Echo, and the Dollhouse.

From a critical non-spoilery aspect, this episode felt a bit of a hodge-podge of old sci-fi/conspiracy tv and movie tropes. What follows is not really a critical review - I'll leave that to others - so much as a meta. The reason I'm writing about Dollhouse as opposed to Sarah Connor or BSG - is that everyone else is writing about Sarah Connor and BSg, but very few (on my flist) are writing about Dollhouse. I like to write about things that others aren't writing about or at least in a different way, as opposed to just adding more fuel to an already blazing the fire.

As I was writing this review, I started remembering the old Jefferson Starship song - Go Ask Alice - One Drug Makes You Larger, One makes you spin around, or something along those lines - I can remember the tune, but the lyrics as always escape me. Memory is a funky thing. It latches on to some things, but loses others. Drugs have been used to enhance and demolish memories. LSD was an experimental drug when it was first created - back in the 1960s. Timothy Leary was one of the psychologists responsible in its creation and usage. It was back in the day a mind alterring substance, utilized to change personality, to help people who were sociopathic or schizophrenic.

Echoes is an episode that centers on the use and effects of mind-alterring memory drugs or rather that's the catalyste that sets everything in motion.

The first scene of this episode is one between Caroline and Adelle DeWitt - where Caroline informs Adelle that she just wants to left alone. Adelle, pouring her a small little cup of tea, tells her she will be after five years. Give me five years of your life, and you can have the rest, it is yours, with no interference. Then she says, somewhat fatefully, "Nothing is what it seems, Caroline." Very true, nothing ever is. Makes me think of that old Gilbert and Sullivan lyric - Nothing is what it seems, skim milk masquerades as cream.

The next scene is a nondescript laboratory. Two students, Sam and some girl, enter to discover their friend, Owen, down to his undies, acting as if he's on a really bad LSD trip. The boy says fly free, fly free to a bunch of jarred insects. Then, after his friends attempt to assist him, rushes to the window to bash his brains out. His two friends begin to giggle uncontrollably, clearly affected by the same substance. The camera pulls back to reveal that they are in the Rossum building at a college campus. The very next scene is Adell DeWitt introducing Clive Barnes, Co-chairman and CEO of the Rossum Corporation, to Topher. Barnes, we are told has won a Pulitzer or Nobel or something or other in science, and runs the leading pharmaceutical corporation in the world. This corporation is behind The Dollhouse or is providing the funding for what is happening at the Dollhouse. Barnes has a problem and needs to enlist DeWitt's actives to resolve it - we need, he informs her, as many actives as possible, in fact you should send all of them. Apparently an untested designer memory drug was released into the air at the campus and is affecting everyone. The drug works on the inhibitors in the brain, unlocking them, and allowing repressed desires, wants, needs, goals to be unleashed. They in effect behave like children.

But as Topher points out, the cool thing about drugs is they effect everyone differently. Our unique biochemistry is just one variable in how we will ultimately react. The reason they are sending in the actives - is the actives do not have any repressed or childhood memories - they have been wiped clean.

Echoes...

The decision is made to send everyone but Echo who is on another fantasy assignment, with the same guy she'd been with in the first episode of the series - the one she'd told Boyd Langton that she liked and wanted to remember. Here, she's the opposite of the girl she'd been in episode one. Instead of being tough and adrenaline girl, she's shy, cautious, and innocent, Alice. Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the Looking Glass - complete with school girl lace and skirt, hair pulled back demurrely. And much like those Alice's she looks at the tv, sees something through the glass - a news report of a boy bashing his head against a window, and feels an overwhelming need to rush to his rescue. Her brain flashing on a lab, with animals in cages, and a boy wounded. It's not the same lab, yet it is, and Alice rushes through the looking glass, back into the real world, the world she'd exited before drinking Adell's tonic, before she took her treatment and entered the Looking Glass World. This is not a story about Alice leaving her nice happy world for the nightmarish one of the Looking Glass, where her identity slowly gets chopped away bit by bit, but a tale of a broken, fractured Alice, journeying back to the real world from the Looking Glass nightmare one of false images and misleads.

As she journeys through, so do we, seeing what is really going on below the creepy facade of the Dollhouse.

The Dollhouse is apparently a psychological experiment set up by the Rossum Corporation. It has tinges of Buffy's the Initiative written all over it. Rossum, we're told, is a leading pharmacuetical company that experiments and manufactures memory drugs. In the past they were experimenting mainly on animals and human fetuses, now they've graduated to human volunteers. This is actually true - pharmaceutical companies do have organized drug trials with human volunteers. I know, I interviewed with Pfizer for a position in their contracts department, which dealt primarily with drug trials. Also, if you have watched any reality tv shows, you probably have noticed that it is not that difficult to get people to do alarming things to themselves and each other, on camera, for money and fame. A few years back, the BBC commissioned and actually filmed a reality tv series based on the infamous [Zimbardo Prison Study](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment). A study that almost cost Zimbardo his career. So I find this actually pretty believable and an interesting critique on society.

We also learn that while DeWitt and Barnes are head-honchos or leaders, they are not the head or owner. Someone else out there is running the show. DeWitt states to Topher in a bit of a rant, that the only reason she doesn't have Barnes position is that he couldn't handle her job. Indicating that neither is ruling this little roost. We're still not sure what is behind the Dollhouse.

Also, the Rossum Corporation may be funding the Dollhouse, and behind it's set-up, but something else is behind the Rossum Corporation.

Then we meet Caroline, who up until this episode, we've only gotten brief flashes of. Caroline is a political activist and crusader. In one flashback, her significance other (Ben?) asks her if she plans on going to every political rally and anti-war protest out there. Clearly a college senior or junior. Another flashback has her planning an inside covert filming of what is going on inside the Rossum Building Laboratories. Rossum - clearly is Caroline's nemesis. "I've been picnicking in the shadow of that evil building for the last four years, it is time I took action," she states in Alice/Echo's flashback. It is the echo of Caroline motivating Echo to visit the campus.

Victor and Sierra are also on campus. And the drug, once they come into contact with it - affects them by releasing similar flashbacks or echoes. They flash on memories that should have been erased. In Sierra's case it is her rape by her handler, Hern and possibly someone else, prior to Hern. In Victor's it is his attempt to save a woman from a building before an explosion knocks him backwards and kills her.

Dominic's reaction to the drug is a desire to give up violence. The gun is too heavy. He feels overwhelmed by guilt for attempting to burn Echo alive in a prior episode, and asks for Alice/Echo's forgiveness. Alice clearly has no idea what he is talking about, she remembers Caroline but not the woman who entered the cult compound. And Topher and DeWitt act like frightened and jittery children, throwing ideas back and forth, while jumping on a trampoline and eating chips.

Topher, it turns out, was right - the drug affects everyone differently. Even Mellie - the reason he and DeWitt get infected to begin with - because they injected poor Mellie with it to find an antidote, and touched her after the fact.

Mellie - the human guinea pig. That's what we are told the actives/dolls are - little more than experimental subjects, all pseudo volunteers, roped into this devil's bargain for untold reasons. Caroline's was simple - she and her boyfriend's plan to film and post the Rossum Corp's wrong-doing on the internet, ended in tragedy. They get caught by a security guard. Who proceeds to chase them and shoots her boyfriend, killing him. Caroline goes into shock, traumatized and guilt-ridden by his death. This explains her comments to Adelle - I just wanted to make a difference, to save the world ...she hadn't intended on anyone getting killed. Her desire to retreat from her guilt, to hide from it and the world, makes her an apt subject for Adelle's experiment in memory tampering - an experiment funded by assorted clients and the Rossum corporation.

Adelle, seems to have mixed feelings about her experiment, as she states, I do believe in our work, I do. Demonstrating that perhaps she's no longer certain? Mellie is taken off Ballard, packs up her belongings and leaves town at the end of the episode, perhaps Adelle's realization that Mellie deserves a break? We aren't told.

Alice/Echo and Sam (one of the kids who had attempted to aid the kid who bashed his skull in at the beginning of the episode and has since been treated for the drug or its just simply worn off), join forces to find out what happened in that lab. To expose Rossum. Alice leads Sam to Lily Foundry - a sewer grate leading into the building. The enter through the back door, or a reverse "rabbit" hole, into the maze and the lab, where Caroline got lost and decided to take that first pill - the one that put her to sleep. It's in that lab that Alice discovers Sam killed Owen, albeit accidentally - he did not know what would happen, in order to take the drug and sell it to a rival drug company. Cornered, Sam gives the drug to Alice and Alice flips back to Caroline - the echoes she's been plagued with become unlocked and real. She relives what happened in that lab, and why she went through the looking glass.

The back story in of itself is rather simplistic and not that interesting - she and her boyfriend had discovered that Rossum was not just experimenting on animals. They got caught. Her boyfriend died. She chases Sam, as Caroline, and takes him down, part of her seeing the murderer who killed her boyfriend, part seeing her boyfriend die in front of her all over again. She wants to kill and save him - an explanation of her guilt - for she was indirectly responsible for her boyfriend's death. Her obsession with Rossum got him killed. To punish herself - she takes Rossum's deal and becomes literally one of the animals she sees in the cages, and had once upon a time so desperately wanted to save.

The ending is rather creepy and reminded me of a tv show or film that I can't quite place. Once again, we have Adelle in that room with the tea. Just like the first scene of the episode. And once again she is offering her devil's bargain to her reluctant quarry. Except unlike Caroline, who she played cat and mouse with for quite a while before they ever reached this room, Sam sits across fuming. She offers him what he killed Owen to obtain - give me five years of your life, just five, and your mother will be taken care of, she will be able to pay those bills. And you will, in five years, be able to support her without difficulty. Sign these papers and we are on our way...And Sam sips her tea, takes the little red pill, and falls into Adelle's looking glass world, where Adelle is the Red/White Queen and Dominic her White/Red King. Lewis Carroll stays out of sight.

**Author's Note:**

> **As an aside or footnote to the above, one of the most disturbing things about [ Lewis Carroll's ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll) Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass - books I studied in college, is if you look too closely, you begin to pick up on Carroll's [creepy](http://www.newser.com/story/43135/lewis-carroll-letter-points-to-pedophile-leanings.html) relationship with Alice, the little girl he wrote the stories for. Carroll may or may not have actually molested Alice, but his stories, do have that odd connotation, when you place them under the psychological microscope. Of course the same could be said of many stories, including DOLLHOUSE. They are far more interesting from a mathmatical perspective as well as a philosophical one, without the squicky emotional cadences. That's the problem with analysis, you can, if you want to, find all sorts of objectionable things in the story that you are analyzing. Whether they are really there is arguable.
> 
> ***Jefferson Starship (later to be renamed Jefferson Airplane or maybe it's the opposite), did the song about Alice or ["White Rabbit"](http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/White-Rabbit-lyrics-Jefferson-Starship/62C97BED01DCBE0A48257038000E8A56%22) \- one drug makes you small, and one makes you large, just go ask Alice... - at the height of the sixites. Go Ask Alice - comes from that song and is also the title of a YA non-fiction memoir - which is the published diary of a girl who died of an overdose of drugs. Her parents published her diary after her death in the attempt to save others.


End file.
